OkCupid data says you are secretly racist

Since 2010 OkCupid founder Christian Rudder has been running a blog analysing the millions of person-to-person interactions that take place on the dating site.

As his book, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking), gets a hardcover release, he has re-examined a highly contentious subject, race and attraction.

He feels that compared to 2009, users of the site as less open-minded when it comes to race, with bias towards people of their own ethnicity intensifying.

Answering his own question on whether OkCupid users were racist, Rudder wrote: "No. I mean, not any more than anywhere else. All the dating data I’ve seen fits OkCupid’s pattern: black people and Asian men get short shrift."

He added: "An individual can’t really control who turns them on—and almost everyone has a 'type,' one way or another. However, I do think the trend—that fact that race is a sexual factor for so many individuals, and in such a consistent way—raises deeper questions."

The data below relates to 25million accounts from 2009 to 2014, and is not a consistent set (meaning some accounts have been closed and new ones added).

The values relate to "preference versus the average", so in 2009 Asian men rated Asian women as 11 per cent more attractive than the average woman.